American Murder Meets American Idol

Former Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) detective Mark Fuhrman was convicted of perjury in 1996 for lying under oath during the O.J. Simpson murder trial. A defense attorney asked if he’d referred to a black person as a “nigger” in the last 10 years, and Fuhrman said he hadn’t. Several witnesses contradicted him, including screenwriter Laura Hart McKinny, who produced recordings of Fuhrman using the word.

Simpson’s lawyers played the race card to defend a man who’d brutally murdered two people, and they succeeded. Fuhrman had found the infamous bloody glove Simpson wore during the murders, and the defense accused him of planting it. Blamed for Simpson’s subsequent acquittal, Fuhrman apologized in his New York Times bestseller Murder in Brentwood for using the slur, and documented errors the LAPD and the prosecutors made that undermined an otherwise strong case against Simpson.

Fuhrman followed up with several more books and now works as a Fox News consultant on criminal cases. In his latest book, The Murder Business: How the Media Turns Crime Into Entertainment and Subverts Justice (Regnery), he exposes the media’s inaccuracies, faulty reporting, and sensationalism in eight high-profile murder cases, including Caylee Anthony, killer cop Drew Peterson, Martha Moxley, Scott Peterson, and the case that started it all, O.J. Simpson.

“The media have become major players in the criminal justice system and their power increased dramatically in recent years,” Fuhrman writes. “By studying the media’s behavior in specific cases, criticizing their errors and applauding their successes, I hope to raise public awareness of a serious problem in our society, and begin a discussion of possible solutions.”

Law enforcement and the media have different agendas. The police want to apprehend the perpetrator and seek justice for the victim, and the media want to prolong cases and produce high ratings. They do nothing to try to help solve the case. Fuhrman lays most of the blame on cable news shows. It might surprise some readers to know that he acknowledges the kind of victim the media love and is critical of their fixation:

Typically, the victims are female. Without exception, they are white and very pretty. In a ghoulish moment, American Murder meets American Idol, as America chooses its prettiest corpse, onto whom our collective horror is projected. It begins with a photograph that quickly becomes iconic in our culture, a name we adopt into our national conversation as if we were speaking of someone we all knew. JonBenét. Caylee. Stacy Peterson. Laci Peterson.

12 Comments, 12 Threads

1.
John O'Neill

Mark Fuhrman makes an excellent point. The Media have perverted justice for a long time in their preoccupation with creating the “narravtive”. However he left out the most glaring example of media/police/local authority malfesance in our country’s history. The famous case of Teddy Kennedy and a dead woman in his car which was found on the bottom of a pond. The handling of that case by the authorities and the media was a cover up of gigantic scope. Ted Kennedy controlled everything from his Hyannis headquarters and prevented an autopsy from being performed and ordered the body flown out of Massachusettes to Pennsylvania right away. This was the beginning of the perversion of the American justice system. The media even tried to spin the story to the interpretation that it was a “Kennedy” tragedy; somehow the dead girl was not the victim but the rich privileged Teddy Kennedy was the victim. That case will always be the prime example of how justice is perverted by the rich and the famous.

Another case that many PajamasMedia readers probably haven’t heard of, but that is a good example, is that of Ryan Frederick. On my blog, I did a break down of the initial media coverage and how they fell down, and in this case it’s actually even worse because the man was railroaded into a terrible sentence which the media should have gone nuts over because it was so transparently corrupt. Even in the beginning, before Radley Balko started exposing sordid detail after sordid detail through his own investigative journalism, there were enough details in the “official account” that eyebrows should have been raise–but weren’t.

The mainstream media is an enabler of this corruption because it just regurgitates official accounts 99.99% of the time.

This was the beginning of the perversion of the American justice system.

Hardly. Our system has always had corruption of this magnitude, but what has made things worse in recent years is the combination of the mainstream media’s out of control behavior (it either spins it into a narrative or actively aids the suppression of suspicious stories like Kennedy’s victim and many of the victims of police and prosecutor corruption) and the powerlessness the average citizen has now before the legal system due to the complexity and scope of the laws.

“The narrative was right but the facts were wrong.” That infamous statement was in regard to another case of journalistic malpractice, the Duke Lacrosse “rape” case. The narrative was about white privilege and how rich jocks could get away with raping a poor black woman. The facts were that there was no rape at all.

Done properly, journalism has a vital role to play in our society. However, their stock in trade is their credibility. Without credibility, they have nothing. Too bad they’re flushing their credibility in the name of higher ratings and the “narrative.”

Larry J. hit the nail on the head. When it comes to journalism, credibility and integrity are paramount. Of course, the public has a responsibility to know the difference between journalism and sensationalism. Nancy Grace and Mike Galanos are not journalists, nor do they report the news. In fact, they have more in common with Billy Mays than they do Walter Cronkite.

or the “innocent” perpetrator is white and very pretty. RE: mary kay letourneau. The media loved her so much, they made movies romanticizing her crimes. If she’d been a polynesian male, and twice impregnated her 12 year old white female victim, the MSM would have crucified her.

One of my favorite hobby horses is bashing the old saw that things are getting worse in criminal justice proceedings, when OJ can get away with murder by claiming racism on the part of Fuhrman and others. People who speak as if this is something new are ignorant of history.

Waaaay back in the middle part of the 19th century, Daniel Sickles was on trial for murder in Washington DC. Sickles was a prominent Congressman, married to a beautiful socialite, and they were one of the glamor couples of the capitol just before the Civil War. Mrs. Sickles was having an affair with a local lawyer named Philip Barton Key, the last living descendant of the guy who wrote “The Star-Spangled Banner”. Apparently, pretty much everyone in Washington knew Key was cuckolding Sickles, and somehow Sickles *didn’t* know for a good long while. When he did find out, he thought it very humiliating, so he went and confronted Key in the street, and shot him dead. He then went to a local police station and turned himself in. You’d think he would easily be convicted, but you’d be wrong.

In those days juries were all-male. Sickles engaged a “dream team” of lawyers, led by the leading criminal attorney of the day, but including Edwin Stanton (later Lincoln’s Secretary of War) and Thomas F. Meagher (a famous Irish patriot, orator, and future Civil War general). The defense strategy was clever: a sort of 19th century jury nullification appeal. The defense officially claimed temporary insanity, but in actuality the defense position was “he deserved it, Sickles is an aggrieved husband”. With the subtext of “What would you do if he was sleeping with your wife?” the all-male jury dutifully declared Sickles not guilty by reason of temporary insanity, and set him free. He went back to Congress, became a general during the Civil War, lost a leg at Gettysburg, and lived a long and mostly happy life. Oh and yes, he accepted his wife’s apology, and they resumed their marriage.

There are other cases, but you get the point. Juries, and the public, have always been easy to manipulate. The media perhaps has seen its role change, expand, and of course the medium has completely changed, with newspapers almost disappearing. However, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Fuhrman’s critique of murder investigations is based on the credibility he has given himself from his years of employment by the Los Angeles Police Department. Yet he fails to mention any of the huge mistakes he made in his own crime scene investigations.

In one murder case, he was looking for a bullet and found what looked like a bullet hole in a door. He removed the door, dismantled it, then, after finding no bullet, threw the entire door and all its pieces into a dumpster, where, of course, it was lost forever to both the prosecution and the defense. Good police work, right?

I came to the conclusion that Fuhrman is a liar after I pulled his suit against the city of Los Angeles where he sued the city for disability claiming he was disabled from working as a LAPD officer because of the violent stress level of his job.

The court did not determine if Fuhrman was telling the truth but near the end of the case was this, “He is taking two college classes,… working out at a gym bodybuilding every day, dating a woman who is a professional bodybuilder and collecting disability.” Fuhrman’s claim was denied and he had to go back to work.

It looked to me like Fuhrman lied in his lawsuit, lied to get the city to continue to pay disability for the leisurely lifestyle he was so enjoying.

It amazes me that people who are genuinely outraged at the OJ acquittal seem to be the very folks who eagerly clasp the egregious Fuhrman to their virtuous bosoms. This wretched man more than any single person or thing is responsible for the Simpson jury’s verdict. He’s a self-confessed racist, a convicted perjurer and a wanton self-aggrandizer. And he was a lousy cop.

He joined forces with another moral nonentity, that weasel with serpent’s fangs, Dominic Dunn, to fabricate a murder conviction in the appalling Moxley killing. Without the vile atmosphere of hatred, class envy and anti-Kennedy loathing assiduously generated and cunningly focused by Fuhrman and Dunn Michael Skakel would never have been convicted on the thin as rice paper evidence presented by the prosecution. Fuhrman now excoriates the excesses of the media that were eager co-conspirators with him in that miscarriage of justice.

On top of which he tut-tuts sickeningly about the public obsession with young blonde pretty female murder victims while the case he chose in order to make his breakthrough into bestselling print featured none other than Martha Moxley, a fifteen year old, blonde, pretty female murder victim!